Through our very own editors and guest writers, this blog will discuss the INSIDE scoop on the admissions process of various schools and programs. If you wish to ask a specific question, please write to us, and we will make every attempt to address your questions in our future blog discussions.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Micro-Scholarships: Solution to the Financial Squeeze of College?

Scholarships are one of the great untapped resources of college financing. There are lots of them. Even better-we now have the internet-so it's far easier to find them. (My next post is going to include a list of the quirkiest scholarships available-you'd be surprised). Still, many students don't consider pursuing scholarships until junior year or later. And, of course, most students don't even know what their budget will be until they've received their acceptances in late Spring.

Enter programs like raise.me. Colleges and universities register with the site, and provide a number of minimum metrics required for admission (like GPA). The program itself is funded largely by endowments from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook, amongst others. Students signing up with raise.me can expect to get paid money for various achievements, such as taking an AP class, and earning a high grade in that class.

Students can thus log achievements with the site during high school and rack up credit towards scholarship money-up to $80,000. The site is both financial and merit based. The lower the income of the applying student, the greater the scholarship.

The students are locked into the schools registered with raise.me, and they must substantiate their achievements in order to receive the scholarship money. Last year, the program distributed an average of $20,000 scholarship money to each student involved.

In addition to incentivizing academic and community performance during the high school years, raise.me helps students cultivate more meaningful relationships with colleges during the lead-up years. Increasing the engagement between student and university is a symbiotic benefit that will hopefully lead to improved student-college compatibility.